Creating my first P&P RPG

[Mark Rhodes]

My friends and I recently started making a mostly original pen and paper RPG made to be played over skype or teamspeak. It is mostly based on creativity of the players and the GM is just there to enforce rules, speak for NPC's, and decide whether or not the player's responses were good enough to work. The only real dice rolling is in combat. Does anyone have any tips for first timers? None of us have a ton of experience with other P&P games and would love advice as to what makes them fun.

 

[hiei82]

My friends and I recently started making a mostly original pen and paper RPG made to be played over skype or teamspeak. It is mostly based on creativity of the players and the GM is just there to enforce rules, speak for NPC's, and decide whether or not the player's responses were good enough to work. The only real dice rolling is in combat. Does anyone have any tips for first timers? None of us have a ton of experience with other P&P games and would love advice as to what makes them fun.

I think that since the rules mechanics are going to be simple, that means you'll need a unique concept and complex story world for the game setting to make the game engaging. Lots of secret history, interesting nations (and species if appropriate). A good resource for creating an interesting world (if you're doing a fantasy world) is Dawn of Worlds [http://www.clanwebsite.org/games/rpg/Dawn_of_Worlds_game_1_0Final.pdf] - a free, open source world generation game.


What game mechanics you do use need to seem (and ideally be) fair. That means that a character who is trained with a sword for example should have a better chance of hitting someone untrained, but the untrained person should still have the possibility of landing a blow.

Hope that helps